10,000 followers: SJA reaches Twitter landmark - Sports Journalists' Association

The SJA already has a record number of members, but over the weekend the Association reached another, digital landmark, as its Twitter feed, @SJASport, attracted its 10,000th follower.

Now we realise that not all of those followers are necessarily full-time, professional sports journalists, as is required for membership of the SJA. The press boxes and photography positions of Britain really would be overcrowded if that was the case.

But the five-figure following does demonstrate the wide, even global, interest in the activities in sports journalism and the broader sports media, and what the Sports Journalists’ Association of Great Britain is doing.

The SJA’s Twitter account – largely used to alert people to articles on this website, or to highlight relevant content from our members and other publications – has been active for barely two years, so this exponential online growth via social media is an exciting breakthrough for our 64-year-old organisation that even in the early years of this century communicated to its membership through a handful of newsletters sent through the post each year.

This website, since its launch six years ago this month, has become a vital communication tool to reach our members and the wider sports media community. It now enjoys more than 70,000 visits each month, and regularly attracting 3,000 readers on weekdays.

The SJA also has a Facebook page, which is free to join and can be seen here.

So to those new followers of @SportSJA, we would like to say welcome. If you haven’t followed us yet, it is a painless, quick and inexpensive process: just click here.

To those professional sports journalists who follow @SportSJA, but have not yet signed up to join the Association, we would ask that you consider doing so immediately, and so not risk missing out on a range of special events and money-saving offers we are working on for Olympic year.

And to those of you who are not qualified for membership – perhaps you are an undergraduate with a keen interest in the media and sport? Or maybe you work in sports-related PR, but have no background in journalism? – then we suggest you look out for a special announcement about SJA membership categories which we hope to make before the end of this month, especially for you.